


we could be immortal (just not for long)

by meguri_aite



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, dreams and delusions of one kavinsky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-08
Updated: 2015-09-08
Packaged: 2018-04-19 18:18:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4756346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meguri_aite/pseuds/meguri_aite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote>
  <p>You see a boy drown in blood blossoming from his slashed veins, eyes shut tight and mouth a nightmare-taut line, and you know you want him.<br/>You also know the boy belongs to someone else.<br/>You laugh, undeterred. Thieves never are.</p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	we could be immortal (just not for long)

You see a boy drown in blood blossoming from his slashed veins, eyes shut tight and mouth a nightmare-taut line, and you know you want him.

You also know the boy belongs to someone else.

You laugh, undeterred. Thieves never are.  

 

He doesn’t show up at Aglionby the next week, but you know he will, eventually, and you know where - by the shadow hanging over the head of the school’s golden boy, by the worry lines etched into the face of his overachieving sidekick. Gansey, you know. Dick, you repeat spitefully into his face, ever-ready to express your contempt for his dumb goodie-two-shoes, straight-toothed perfection. He is unimpressed and also boring as fuck, but the dreamer is his shadow, and you know it is by his side that he will eventually reappear, thrumming with anger, secrets, and more anger.

When the boy comes back, the planes of his face are all blacks and hollows, the cuts on his arms are bandaged tightly, crowding the leather bands at the narrow space by his wrists. You think you can smell blood and nightmares on him, and you are delighted by the feral edge to his smile, the hot waves of hatred washing off him. It tickles your lungs with recognition, and you need to know how far the similarities go.

 _Burn_ , you whisper, poking fingers into the coals gleefully - it would be a waste to let them just smoulder, if he was big on control.

You are thrilled to discover he is anything but.

Ronan Lynch bares his teeth in a string of obscenities directed your way, and the sharp line of his angry mouth is fascinating as he smiles like he’s declaring war.

He doesn’t know yet that you are on the same side.

Until he does, war will do, you think hungrily.

 

The dream place is still dark and hostile, a dimension to cheat, hit and run, but these days, it feels bigger. Big enough to fit two and their nightmares, trailing behind. You feel more like a hunter, a tamer, than a thief, as you crouch behind some dead bushes hiding you from the whispering trees. Thorny branches prickle and scratch your face, and you remember the invisible claws leaving gaping slashes on his arms, and you want to see the monster that they belong to - his monster. This place could hold it all, you think, tens and thousands of them and the two of you, and it would all fit in here.

And if it didn’t, you’d dream up another place that would. You imagine towering dunes of dream things, replicas of replicas, discarded and broken and left to rot in one glorious pile, like the world’s most bizarre car graveyard, and the two of you ruling it, sprawled at its highest point. Two thief kings laughing in the face of dull reality, leaving it behind with a pill and a snap of your fingers.

You’ll get him there. You’ll feed the wild beast bits and pieces of this dream kingdom until he sees it as clear as you do.

Your fingers curl around leather straps soaked in his blood, and you laugh.

 

Every time he’s mouthing off some bullshit, one long arm casually cradling the driver’s side of his BMW, never betraying the tension of the last few seconds before it’s time to push the gas pedal to the limit, you feel your kinship so keenly you think the air should be cracking with it. It might be, too, and you just don’t hear it over the roar of engines, the scream of burning tires, the bass overriding your heartbeat.

 _Suck that, prince dick_ , you think as you slam your foot on the gas pedal until it threatens to snap. This is no place for the likes of him, but it is just the right one for the likes of you.

A wild howl echoes in your ears long after Ronan’s gone, disappeared in an afterimage of red rear lights, and you don’t really mind. He can’t outrun this, he can’t outrun you where it matters, and he should know it just as well as you do.

He should have been chased by enough monsters to know that the nightmares always catch up with you.

 

Sometimes, you dream of him - on the Mitsu’s hood, in its backseat, in an empty car park, in a full car park, against a brick wall with a texture so rough you don’t need to touch it to know it would scrape skin and draw blood - towering over you and eclipsing the sun, flashing his teeth wickedly from behind your fingers splayed against his face.

But never in the dream place, never in the forest. These are just regular dreams, ones that even dogs and polo shirts can dream - except you choose to dream them. 

A replica of him would never be nearly good enough, you know, and maybe the forest knows it, too. Maybe it doesn’t have one you could sneak out.

The thought excites you even more.

When he brings you a pair of white-rimmed Ray Bans, you can practically taste the dream stuff they are made of, and your heart thumps heavy with the knowledge.

It is close. He is close, almost within reach.

 

The night he shows up in the golden boy’s precious Camaro, you know this is it.

“I’m impressed,” you breathe out, meaning much more than just stealing the toy. Though that, too, pleases you. You - one, dick the third - zero, you think, and the premonition of victory tastes sweet, like gasoline and crack and the salty leather of his wristbands. It loosens your tongue, as if his presence hasn’t done that already. The Camaro doesn’t suit him - Ronan Lynch needs something dark and sleek and deadly, something that could tear through the night and right into nightmare territory - but the theft does. Fuck, does it ever. You can’t stop grinning.

“You know me,” you say tenderly, “I just hate to be alone.” The exchange of insults has always been your foreplay, and if the acidic smile twisting his lips is anything to go by, it is enjoyed by all.

You already know this night is going to be full of surprises, and soon he learns it, too, the very moment you overtake him on your dream-pimped Mitsu, ever-faithful and utterly replaceable, just like everything else. Just like everyone else, except dreamer boys.

His stream of curses is drowned out by the hum of the engine - you fucking love flipping off reality just like that - and in your rearview mirror you see your victory reflected in the tacky hood of the Camaro.

Scraping a clawed, fanged abomination of shadows and feathers off that same hood, now a delightful ruin, a roaring mess of twisted metal and orange paint, and seeing the stark angles of Ronan’s face framed by windscreen shatters is a beautiful way to continue the night.

“Try to keep up, Lynch,” you say, and it is a promise of things to come.

The world, _all_ the worlds, are in the palm of your hand when you’re taking him in your forged Mitsu into your - both of yours - dreamscape. It is littered with shards and bones of the pretty rubbish you’ve thieved, and his eyes grow impossibly wider and bluer, taking in every detail as hungrily as you want to give it to him.

“I know what you are,” you confide in him, now your partner in crime. When Ronan sees the whole of that wasteland of unwanted and broken toys, when he learns the sheer size of the kingdom you’re offering, the blue of his eyes scorches your insides with understanding.

“An entire world,” you confirm, shivering with the eagerness to tear his old, smaller one to shreds. Nothing can hold you back now.

You drink until he passes out on you, until the taut muscles in his neck and arms ease a bit and he slumps bonelessly across your leather couch. You can’t decide if you prefer his dreaming face, even breathing and closed eyelids connecting him to the realm that belongs to the both of you, or Ronan in his full warpaint of shadows, bruises and thundering blood. You inhale your question unanswered, together with a line of white powder, and stay awake, watching fireworks going off in your head in sync with the steady rise and fall of his chest.

“You have to know what you want,” you tell his sleeping form. You have no problem following your own advice. You take a minute to inform prince dick of just that.

 

Time loses its meaning, dimensions shrink until there is nothing left but the dry air inside the Mitsu, impossibly cool in contrast to the summer heat outside, and the unconscious dream thief next to you. You watch Ronan knock himself out over and over, stumbling headfirst into the dreamplace like an animal thrashing blindly in a snare, and you patiently send him back over the edge, as many times as needed. The world behind the car doors might just as well blow to smithereens, and you would neither notice nor care, and there is just the pulse line running through his bare neck, the silence of a dreamer wandering through dark places.

When he wakes up next, it is with a Molotov cocktail seconds away from exploding into your faces, and you greet the destruction with open arms and a triumphant howl. You’ll set the whole world on fire yet, you and him. Your kingdom is growing large enough for two, and it tastes like sweat on the leather seats, like burnt brakes and the dew on the white metal hood, like the undecipherable whisper of the dream forest. He takes pills from your hand, one after another, and your fingertips burn with his breath, with greed and exhilaration. Two kings, you think fondly, and pull back for the time being, until you are both on that highest peak overlooking the wasteland.

Until then, you push him back into familiar delirium, forward, and if in doing so your hand traces the ink patterns lifted right off the realms of his nightmares, then maybe it’s not even your doing. Maybe he’s just dreaming it. Or you are. It's getting hard to tell the difference.

When he wakes up, it is not in your Mitsubishi. He grins at you from the driver’s seat of the obnoxiously bright Camaro, a loud creation of metal and paint and dreams, and it is a victor’s grin.

You win, you think. Both of you.

 

And then he revs the engine, and leaves you with a lungful of exhaust fumes, a field cluttered with dream toys and _it was never going to be you and me_.

 _Burn_ , you think, and it is a promise of things to end.

 

The forest hisses and stings you with frayed branches, chasing you away so it can heal the tears in its flesh. You watch it with indifferent patience. You let it lick its wounds, and imagine every last blade of grass scorched dry and lifeless with the fire that will suck every drop of magic out of this dreamplace and burn every inch outside it, starting from the unconcerned line of his mouth, the casual shrug of his dismissal.

Soon, you think, and in the remaining time to you tell him things.

_ask me what my first dream was_

_did you know you could bring things there, just not living ones_

_guess where my proud papa is_

_my favourite forgery is prokopenko_

You never hear back from him.

It helps kill time, you tell yourself.

Good timing is important for a good show.

 

When you see him again, he is murder and thunderstorms and it suits him much better than complacency.

“I will destroy you,” he hisses in your face. His hate is incendiary, and it tells you you will get your way in this, at least. At last. “Don’t let me down, Lynch.”

You feel almost sorry, but not for anything you’ve done. He picked wrong, and now the world is on fire.

 

It is the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen. It is all you’ve ever wanted.

 

**Author's Note:**

> written for and with many thanks to [hamsterwoman](http://hamsterwoman.livejournal.com) and [throwingscissorsatinternets](http://throwingscissorsatinternets.tumblr.com), who stoically (and somewhat gleefully) held my hand while I spiralled down this story arc into hell, and also helped me fix errors in this fic ♥
> 
> the few lines of dialogue that this story has are all taken from _Dream Thieves_ , i only took my liberties with writing a few more of Kavinsky's texts
> 
> the title, obviously, comes from _Immortals_ by FOB *happy angry bass noises*


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